From James Taranto:

‘I don’t consider myself a tea party candidate,” Sean Bielat tells me over dinner. “I don’t know what it means.” But an hour later Mr. Bielat, Rep. Barney Frank’s Republican challenger, receives a hero’s welcome at the Spindle City Tea Party, a gathering of nearly 200 citizen- activists in this economically depressed mill town. As he approaches the stage, they stand, applauding and chanting “Go, Sean, go!”

What he tells them is consistent with this reporter’s view of the tea party: “I’m starting to think that people want to take this country back—that people no longer believe that the government has the answers for our betterment, that the government can tell them how they should use their money. People believe that they have the power to create their own opportunity, if only they are given the chance. . . . There is so much wrong in Washington, I almost don’t know where to start.”…

Two things are clear with recent events – even Democrats in supposedly safe seats are worried, and the Republican party is finding challengers who are brim full of both new ideas and a willingness to just listen and learn as they go along. The people are talking and candidates like Bielat are listening. This is a potent force to bring against someone as entrenched in the Ruling Class as Barney Frank.

To be sure, Bielat has an uphill fight – but as a Marine, he was trained to overcome just such obstacles. I don’t know if he’ll win on November 2nd, but I’m betting he’ll at least make it very close…and, who knows?, he just might pull it off.

It is the success that people like Bielat – and O’Donnell in Delaware – are having which makes me think that we’ve been too gun shy on the right. We’ve resigned parts of the nation to the left simply because the left has represented the area for a long time. But Bielat points out that Frank hasn’t had a real challenger since 1982 – Frank’s strength could well prove illusory, as can the strength of other entrenched liberals.

Win or lose against Frank here in 2010, we need to learn this lesson and apply it in 2012 and beyond. Challenge everywhere. In the GOP primaries, and in all general election battles. Our goal should be to never let any politician run unopposed. If we want our government to be under our control, the first step is to exercise that control the only way possible – in election contests.

We can save our nation – all we need to is put in the effort.

UPDATE: Moe Lane reports that Charlie Cook has shifted Frank’s seat from “Safe” to “Likely”, as well as four other entrenched Democrat seats. This is a political tsunami building, my friends…

We still love him:

Close to10,000 people crowded into the Bakersfield Business Conference’s main tent to see former Vice President Dick Cheney be “interviewed” by Lynne Cheney, his wife of 46 years.

Collecting that many people all under one tent roof is a sight to see, and Mrs. Cheney commented on what a great crowd the conference had brought together.

“It’s almost enough to make you want to run for office again,” the former vice president quipped. “Almost.”…

It seems that our former VP is ailing, and taking a look at recent pictures, I have to say I’m concerned he might not be with us too much longer. But it is heartwarming to see that 10,000 of my fellow Americans are willing to go hear him speak – it is testimony to the great service he has rendered our nation in a long life of politics.

Is Dick Cheney without sin? No man is. He’s made his mistakes as all of us have. But he’s a good man who has tried to do what he thought was right, and he helped us through two major crisis (end of the Vietnam War, 9/11).

I wish the former Vice President the best, and I express my thanks for his service to our nation.

From Townhall:

Forty three years ago this week, Ernesto “Che” Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying “What goes around comes around” ever fit, it’s here.

“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” said a former Cuban political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez, to your humble servant here, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.” As commander of the La Cabana execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che’s second-story office in Havana’s La Cabana prison had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work…

The only difference between Che and Stalin is that Stalin preferred to let others do his dirty work – Che seemed to have a zest for the work of murder and oppression.

He is an icon on the left simply because a romantic photo was taken of him and turned in to a pop-culture staple. This is one of the best examples of the shallowness of liberal thinking – what Che did, what he was like, doesn’t matter…the photo is cool, and so liberals have loved him for decades, and will continue to do so for as long as liberalism has adherents.

It is disgusting, but no more disgusting than seeing any communist symbol, anywhere. We are justly horrified at any display of Nazi symbols, but not so for communist emblems…under which far more people were done to death than under the Nazi banner. What has happened regarding this is that a lie has been deeply implanted in to our society – that while Nazism is unrelieved evil, communism is some how not. That there was no functional difference between the two systems doesn’t seem to matter – people have been told, endlessly, that communist ideology is for the people, so even if it has glaring errors, it is ok.

What is important here is to recognize the lie. Each time a lie is seen for what it is, it becomes less potent…and gets further along towards being discarded, altogether. There will come a day when people will look at Red and Brown and see the same evil – and that will be good, because it will then be less likely anyone will ever fall for them, again.

From CNN:

Rep. Chris Van Hollen –- the Democrat tasked with maintaining control of the House -– says it is a sign of his party’s strength that several Democrats are touting their opposition to President Obama ahead of the midterm elections.

“We’re proud of the fact that we have an ideologically diverse caucus. We have a whole range of different political viewers. What they’re talking about is their independence on certain issues,” Van Hollen, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told CNN’s Candy Crowley on State of The Union…

Translation: sauve qui peut – every man for himself. Go ahead, run against Obama and the House Leadership…just save as many D’s as you can!

They are losing and they know it – we’ve got them on the run.

As usual, it will be conservative Republicans coming in to clear up the mess made by liberal Democrats…but this time with an extra twist of the knife for our liberals – from the Telegraph:

…Barring a cataclysmic upset, Scott will be elected to Congress on November 2nd. There, he will be a ferocious opponent of Obama, to whom he gives a withering “failing grade” for his presidency.

“Obamacare’s an atrocity around the necks of average Americans,” he told me. “His intentions might be good but he’s leading us towards the brink of bankruptcy. Right now, the American people are simply saying they’ve had enough.”

Scott will be the first black Republican congressman from the Deep South in more than a century…

…Ironically, opposition to the policies of the first black President on a whole range of economic and social issues are a key motivating factor for this new wave of black conservatives…

And it will be these black Republicans – with plenty more to come as the racial barriers erected by liberalism are torn down – who will do what Obama was supposed to do: make race a moot issue in America. Obama promised us racial healing, he gave us racial animosity – he’s played the liberal race card from the bottom of the deck. Now he and his liberals are going to get the best answer from the American people – Americans who happen to be black telling Obama and his liberals where to get off.

Longer term, the most important effect of these black Republicans is that they will be living, breathing answers to the liberal idea that black people can’t make it in “white” America. This, in and of itself, will be a grand service to our great nation. The times are, indeed, a-changing…and liberalism is about to be buried.

Hal Lewis’ resignation from the American Physical Society:

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010…

…It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist…

Do read the entire linked letter – a stunning rebuke to the politicization of science over the past few decades. And just in case you liberals out there think this guy hasn’t got any credentials:

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making).

Certainly a man who knows what science is. This issue of science being subordinated to politics is very alarming – aside from global warming, what other issues are being skewed because the scientists we rely upon for facts are being twisted by desires for grants, or worries about reputations if they dissent from reigning orthodoxy?

In my view, all of this ultimately stems from the way we allowed the hard left to infect our institutions of higher education. For a long while, the hard sciences were immune from the lies – after all, science is science and you can either prove your theory, or you can’t. But as time went on, the leftwing worldview gained hold, and anyone who wanted to advance in an academic career, regardless of their particular discipline, had to toe the liberal line. In large measure, we can’t rely upon anything coming out of a major university…it may or may not be true, and we can’t rely upon it until we’re sure that a genuinely independent group of scientists had a look at it.

The truth shall set you free – and so truth is not popular on the left. One of the tasks we’ll have to set ourselves it to revive the standards of truth in higher education. Science must be something which goes where ever facts and human reason lead – not something subordinated to whatever political fads are agitating the left at the moment.

And that seems to be the rosy scenario:

The U.S. economy lost 95,000 jobs in September, far worse than expectations for no change in employment. More Census-related temp jobs ended, as expected, but state and local governments slashed staff far more than predicted.

So far in 2010, the U.S. has added just 613,000 jobs — for a monthly average of 68,111.

Employment bottomed in December 2009 at 129.588 million — two years after peaking at 137.951 million. At this year’s pace, the U.S. won’t recoup all those 8.36 million lost jobs until March 2020 — 147 months after the December 2007 high…

And that supposes we actually added private sector jobs – I don’t think we have for several months now. Essentially, when you get the reported number of jobs created, its a guess by BLS…the real numbers don’t come in until about a year later. The BLS, basing itself upon the concept that the recession is over, figures that X number of jobs must have been created and so we get the jobs created number…a year later, when the actual data is available, they are adjusted to reflect what really happened. My bet is for heavy downward revisions.

We can’t spend our way out of this – we must work our way out of this. Our problem (outside of our crushing debt) is lack of production: we don’t make, mine or grow enough things in the United States. Until we balance the budget and set in place policies to encourage production, we’ll get nowhere.

At least, according to Barack Hussein Obama. From an email I received from Mitch Stewart at BarackObama.com (emphases mine):

“This is a threat to our democracy…And if we just stand by and allow the special interests to silence anybody who’s got the guts to stand up to them, our country’s going to be a very different place.”

That’s what the President just said about the Chamber of Commerce, a right-wing group spending $75 million to beat Democrats this fall, and reportedly taking money from foreign corporations — some even owned by foreign governments.

These groups are trying to buy our elections, backing candidates who want to tear down everything that makes the middle class strong in this country: things like Medicare, Social Security, even the minimum wage.

So now the Chamber of Commerce is an extreme right wing radical group??

What’s next, the Jaycees?

Now he’s complaining about foreign money coming in to ad campaigns against his policies – from the NY Times:

…In two campaign stops Thursday, Mr. Obama invoked what he portrayed as a specific new example, citing a blog posting from a liberal advocacy group as he teed off on a longtime adversary, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, over its political spending.

“Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations,” Mr. Obama said. “So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.”…

First off, as the story goes on to note, there is little evidence of foreign money being used by the Chamber for politics but even if there was, Obama is not the man to be complaining about it.

As Instapundit usefully reminds everyone, back in 2008 a flood of absolutely illegal, foreign money came pouring in to the Obama campaign. And that was just the tip of the illegal money iceberg, as Obama’s campaign set things up so that it was surpassingly easy for Americans to illegally exceed contribution limits. As is typical for Democrats, Obama’s campaign was shot through with financial illegality…and now he’s got the nerve to even question someone else’s finances?

Of course he does. He’s a liberal, you see? This means that anything he does to win is good, no matter how illegal. Anything done to oppose him, naturally, is bad, no matter how legal.

But this this just the sort of garbage we’re looking to clear out on November 2nd. President Obama, your time is done – you and all your fellow liberals. We’ve had enough, and we’re going to take our country back.

Crown Publishers has just announced that Decision Points, the forthcoming memoir from President George W. Bush, with have first printing of 1.5 million copies. The book will be released November 9th. A deluxe e-book will also be released simultaneously.  This edition will be interactive, allowing readers to click on text to view additional multimedia content.

The multimedia content in the deluxe e-book edition includes,

• Videos from the defining moments of the Bush presidency, including President Bush’s inspiring speech to 9/11 rescue workers, intimate Bush family movies, and a special introduction to the edition by the President himself
• Handwritten letters from President Bush’s personal correspondence
• Full texts of President Bush’s most important speeches, including his addresses to the nation about the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and his Second Inaugural
• More than 50 additional photographs not contained in the print edition

Sounds like a good reason to get an iPad. Anyway, I’m looking forward to the memoir. Have you pre-ordered yours yet?

Personally, I cannot wait for this book to come out. I have been anxiously awaiting Bush’s memoir pretty much since he left office. Most of you know that this site was once Blogs For Bush, so you can understand why his memoir would be of such high interest for me.  I know that history will look upon his presidency favorably, and I see this memoir as the first step in setting the record straight.